CASE STUDY: Using Bid Marking to Improve Win Rates

For professional service providers, one of the most critical parts of the outsourcing process is the bidding and vendor-selection mechanism. It’s a process that is time consuming, labour intensive, complex and costly; and as the vendor selection is often managed by a third party advisor, this means that the marking is rigorous and the exam-style questions have to be passed in order to progress. It’s hard to believe therefore that despite outsourcing providers investing huge amounts of time and money into the process, many bids fail due to the response being non compliant. A simple yet effective way of ensuring compliance is to employ an experienced independent bid marker.

Bid Marking in Action

By means of an example, a recent outsourcing project illustrates the importance of bid marking and being able to mark the bid twice. At the Pink Team review, only 27% of the 300 detailed questions achieved full compliance and to quote the Bid Manager – “The bid marking highlighted how poor our response was at that stage and clearly indicated what needed to be done in the final few weeks of the bid.” By the Red Team Review, just over 90% of the answers had become fully compliant and this enabled “the final push to target very clearly those answers which still needed attention.” The process was repeated again at the Best and Final Offer (BAFO) stage and the bid was ultimately successful.

Actionable Insight

The Essential Edge uses a tried-and-tested approach to bid marking, providing a full analysis of each individual question thus ensuring that every facet of every question can be adequately answered and therefore enabling full compliance to be achieved. This is an approach that has been successfully employed at a number of highly successful tier 1 and tier 2 outsourcing companies.

Our approach works because the review is performed by highly experienced, independent markers who provide a thorough and truly objective analysis of the bid. Feedback is provided in a simple-to-use Compliance Matrix with a mark given for each individual answer. Non-compliant answers are clearly highlighted with detail given as to what needs to be done in order to achieve full compliance.

For more information email hello@essential-edge.com

About the author

Simon Knowles

A highly engaging and expressive executive who has the capacity to inspire and collaborate with key stakeholders at all levels in the organisation. An accomplished presenter and compelling story-teller, he has successfully and consistently shaped the strategic agenda of market leading companies in Technology & Professional Services across Europe, Middle East & Africa where he has created break-through strategies and go-to-market programmes that have driven superior business performance, channel dominance and sustainable growth. Exceling in the role of business advisor, strategic counsel and thought-leader he continues to challenge & encourage senior business leaders to achieve more.